What would happen if the US presidency were replaced by a plural executive?

I’ve long advocated replacing the US presidency with a plural executive. I think that in the long run, that would drain several poisons from American political culture.

Where a single person is the focus of so much attention, the tendency to believe that the power to solve the world’s problems is in the hands of that person becomes very strong. Supporters of the political party led by a president or candidate for president then come to believe that if the president were unhindered by the restraints of the law, of political opposition, and of morality, evil and hardship would vanish from the earth. Magical thinking of this sort leads to support for wars, disregard for civil liberties, tolerance for secrecy, and other measures that have consistently produced disastrous results throughout history. Meanwhile, supporters of the other party come to believe that it is the personal wickedness of its presidential choice that threatens the earth with the greatest woes, and under that belief lose all contact with political reality, showing ever more fanatical support for their party and its candidate regardless of the facts.

Replacing the presidency with a plural executive would eliminate the glamour and mystique that attach to the office of the chief executive, thereby allowing the clouds of magical thinking to dissipate and creating the possibility that a modicum of rationality might make itself felt in US political life. Perhaps voters would even start to participate in elections for the most powerful bodies in all of American government, the state legislatures.

Such a rise of rationality would take time, however. In the first generation, the plural executive would probably compose a more-or-less representative sample of the existing political elite, and would organize itself around the consensus views in Washington. Of course, a country which had just managed to rid itself of the presidency and to put a plural executive in its place would probably be a saner place than is the celebrity-obsessed, war-mad USA of the early twenty-first century, and so the Washington consensus in that scenario would be quite different from the consensus that exists today. However, it is worth pausing over the thought that, if we did have a plural executive in the USA, that executive would probably be a lagging indicator of prevailing opinion in Washington conventional wisdom, since that description also fits Hillary Rodham Clinton. Indeed, for all her undoubted talents, experience, and work ethic, as a policy-maker HRC could easily be replaced by a software program which would distill the policy recommendations of the leading op-ed pages, think-tanks, etc. Next year, then, we are likely to have a sort of dry run of the workings of a plural executive, though in an environment still driven by delusions about a superhuman god-emperor.